„Kids-Guernica“

has recently participated in. Children and youth paint their visions of peace. The idea originated in Japan in 1995, that is 50 years after the end of Second World War and in memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Due to this unique project there exist by now around the globe about 260 such murals. They have been painted by children all around the world, sometimes by 200 children in a Kindergarten in Greece, or by a gang in the slums of La Martinique, while another time by children in Afghanistan and who would express their experiences of war in such a creative way.

The special and fascinating aspect of this project is that children and youth paint together on a canvas which has the same size as Picasso's famous painting about 'Guernica' by which he expressed the horror felt throughout the world about the bombardment of the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937 by the Germans.The painting is 3,5 x 7,8 m and the „young artists“ of the Helene-Lange-School have created in an exciting process step by step their joint peace mural. Sincde May 18 students from various classes have been working on this project. They stayed behind after school and even came Saturdays to the school, in order to complete the painting.

On 20th of June the mural was presented during an official ceremony in the court yard of the school to all.

At the same time, the sister school of the Helene Lange School, namely the village school „Miracles de Yahvé“ in Togo, have started with their preparations. The plan is to have the students there paint as well their peace mural. Since canvas and paints do cost a lot of money, the Helene Lange School intends to collect money for this purpose. It would be the first Kids' Guernica mural to be painted in Africa, and the children of this African school would have for the first time the opportunity to get to know the use of colours.

The aim is to have both murals be exhibited one day together with other murals during a Kids' Guernica event. The Kids' Guernica murals go very often on trips, in order to be exhibited in different parts of the world. Since the canvas can be easily rolled together, they can be transported easily as part of the baggage one takes with oneself anyhow.

The charakter of the project, that very special creative action as a group process open in terms of outcome, that is at the core of everything and should not be subordinated to any kind of achievement or success criteria or rules of the school.The students at our school came always after school, that is in the afternoon or extra on Saturday, into the "Atelier". Hence it was always clear to them, that this was something else than normal school lessons. We have also always cooked and eaten together on Saturday and during the meals we discussed many things, and so was created a feeling of belonging together in a way which beyond belonging to the same class or same school. This was especially due to the work on the painting being so different from the normal life at school day in, day out. The participants and also we two teachers did not know until the final end what would emerge out of all of this. The students had developed at the start the basic idea out of a broken cage filled with negative words peace manages to escape from and to emancipate itself in a current of happy colours. And this was realized really jointly. Afterwards it was complemented by individual motives and narrative images created at times by one person, another time by a group of students. At all times the students did this in consultation with one another, and collectively they decided how to connect the individual motives with the respective motive. They wanted to know how things can be connected and brought to communication with each other. That was interesting, at times filled with tensions and conflicts, and finally surprising.